This chapter demonstrates the use of machine-coded event data in a study of the Ethiopian civil war and famine. Data on Ethiopian internal conflict and foreign policy are coded from Reuters newswire reports. Environmental changes, like the Ethiopian drought and the famine and refugees it created, were by no means the influential factors at work during the Ethiopian civil war. G. Porter and D. Ganapin studied the complex interaction of environmental, political variables that contributed to the ongoing civil insurgency in the Philippines. Population growth and the severe degradation of agricultural land due to farming practices, deforestation fueled popular support for the Marxist insurgency operating among the peasantry. Despite the massive outmigration of environmental refugees from Ethiopia to neighboring Sudan, there is little evidence of violence between the refugees and the people they encountered after crossing over into Sudanese territory. A positive relationship might be explained by the refugee-linked spillover of the internal domestic, environmental problems into the international realm.